Lesson: Stress Resilience with Paul Campbell

Step #8 Productivity: Productivity is about working smarter

Yeah, from a productivity standpoint, working, we know this, right, it's about how do we work smarter. There are a number of time management techniques that we use when you check email, blocks of time. There's a lot of research around energy management, it's more important about managing your energy then managing time per se, because time, you can start to get pretty, sort of abstract with it, but it's not fixed. It's how productive you are in that time that tells you how much you have been able to get done.

So the ability to be productive within that time, things like working no more then 90-minute blocks and making sure you take a 15-minute break after that, as opposed to saying I'm going to just keep going, keep going, keep going and I didn't get up out of my seat for day after day for hours on end. There are a few times where you'll be in a flow and you can work over a sustained period of time like that, but the norm is that cycle that I talked about of high intensity focused 90 minutes. Give yourself, brain and body a chance to disengage cause there's stuff that's going on, it's background processing and if you don't give yourself, and the brain, and the body a chance to background process, all of a sudden you start to you get those "ah ha", moments, when you do allow yourself to background process and have that break.

There's stuff that's actually going on when your giving yourself that space. So it is counterintuitive, but that's only because we have a very industrialized perspective on productivity, number of widgets in a hour, and that's changing. The economy has changed,our perspective on the economy has to change with it.

There's two things that we've learned. When you go into sleep debt, you never really catch up. So it's not good to go say, “Oh, I'll catch up on the weekend,” right, "I'll sleep four hours a night.” And that we are both from a cleansing standpoint, like cleansing the brain and cleansing the body, this is what happens when we sleep. The other part that happens is that retention piece is strengthened by getting regular sleep and the quality and quantity of sleep for most of us, again, there are outliers but, again, for most of us.